The anonymous protagonist is diagnosed with lung carcinoma shortly after his twentieth birthday, and is admitted to hospice care at a hospital in Mito, Ibaraki. There he meets Setsumi, a woman who is few years older than he is, who is also terminally ill. Finding that they both refuse to die in the hospital or at home with their families, they run away together in a silver Honda Integra belonging to the protagonist's father.They travel west across Japan's many highways and prefectures, initially not knowing where to go, but later collectively decide on taking the narcissus fields of southern Awaji Island as a somewhat arbitrary destination.

Narcissu (ナルキッソス Narukissosu?) is a free visual novel by the dōjin group stage-nana, telling the story of a terminally ill young man and woman.The work was originally written in Japanese by Tomo Kataoka, and subsequently localized and translated into English, Chinese, French, Korean, Russian and Vietnamese by various fan translators. Unlike most fan translations, however, this was an authorised work. The author, however, was not actively involved in the translation process as it had been the case for True Remembrance. Both the original Japanese visual novel and its English version were released as free downloads over the Internet. The web edition of Narcissu has lower graphics and music quality, in order to conserve bandwidth.